Mario Kart inc. Wheel £24.25 @ Zavvi [Wii Games]

Mario Kart causes violence. It's a well known fact that you can forget your GTAs and your MadWorlds, this is by far one of the most violent games I have ever played. People and televisions alike get injured playing this, such is the margin by which you can zoom from last place into first in the dying nano-seconds of a race, thus robbing the meticulous driver who up til that point had driven carefully to maintain their pole position and sending them into a furious rage. It's brilliant and I love it.

If, for some bizarre reason, you own a Wii and haven't bought this yet then you might be interested to know that you can pick it up from Zavvi for just £24.25. You'll need to use a voucher to get that price, as it's normally listed at £26.95, but if you just type in GAMES10 at the checkout you'll be making a saving of just over £2 on the nearest competitor (ShopTo - £26.85).

This Wii version of Mario Kart will take many seasoned players of the Nintendo racing favourite by surprise. I, for example, can readily testify to being able to pull off powerslide boosts with ease, I know when best to deploy bananas in self-defence, and I can do the fiendish wall hop on the Mario Raceway track off of the N64 version. But all that counts for nothing here. With its new motion controls, incredible range of power-ups and easier powerslides, this proves to be much more of a game leveller than others in the series.

There's an abundance of content here, and you pick your racing setup from a roster of 24 characters and 36 vehicles, now including motorcycles for the first time. each character has a different special ability, and each vehicle stacks up differently in terms of weight, speed, handling and acceleration. There are 32 tracks in all, with 16 new ones, and 16 updates of old classics.

You might think the latter would give veterans an advantage, but you'd be wrong. The weapons in the game have been tweaked so that, more so than ever, it's ridiculously easier to have spent two and a half laps in first only to have you checkered flag dreams banished into last position thanks to a blue shell, some lightning, and being smacked into an abyss by Bullet Bill. To be honest, though, this makes for a much less predictable, more frenetic game, that's an absolute blast to play with three other people. It's one of the best multiplayer games on the Wii, and if you don't have it, you really need to ask yourself why the hell not.